QOTW: “The best use for a bug report on comp.lang.python is as an object lesson
for your grandchildren: 40 years from now you can search the
archives for it, and tell the little darlings ‘see? if I had only
put that on SourceForge instead, the bug would have been fixed by
now’.” — Tim Peters
[on the subject of a tree datastructure that consisting of
dicts] “I thought we made dictionaries out of trees… Are you
trying to reverse entropy? ” — Bob Gailer
Discussion
It was an entertaining week on comp.lang.python. Have a look at these
links:
Graham Fawcett is one of the people proposing nice new Python
slogans.
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>Michael Sparks has ideas about what we should do to ‘displace
java’, which somehow also involves SCO 😉
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>Theodor Rash has a warning for us in a discussion about Python
vs. C#. Some people may agree that it is appropriate, others may
find that a few interesting points are actually being
discussed…
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>
Thankfully, serious discussion took place as well 😉
Is the tilde operator ~ acting weird as a bitwise not operation?
Tim Peters explains that it doesn’t.
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>Related to this, an old (but handy) function to print numbers in
binary:
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>The age-old 8-queen-problem sticks up its head again. Bengt
Richter is on the loose with several interesting variatons.
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/[email protected]″>http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>For those that have some free time left this summer, Raymond
Hettinger suggests some interesting reading material, somewhere in
Python’s standard library source code.
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=5d0_a.288$mailto:[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=5d0_a.288$mailto:[email protected]>Alex Martelli provides the ‘real’ powerset function. Interesting
thread about the new sets module by the way.
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>Gerhard Haering shows that it is very easy to run Python off a
Windows network share, instead of a local directory on your own
harddisk.
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/[email protected]>Andrew Dalke and Aahz take __call__ apart. Calling stuff in
Python is rather complicated under the hood, it seems… or isn’t
it?
<<A
HREF=”http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=bhlrgb$q0i$mailto:[email protected]”>http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=bhlrgb$q0i$mailto:[email protected]>
Releases
Pyro 3.3, an advanced and powerful Distributed Object
Technology system written entirely in Python, and designed to be
very easy to use.
<<A
HREF=”http://pyro.sourceforge.net/”>http://pyro.sourceforge.net/>ClientCookie 0.4.4a and ClientForm 0.1.7b, modules for handling
cookies and HTML forms on the client side (useful for simulating a
browser).
<<A
HREF=”http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/”>http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/>dnspython 1.1.0, a DNS toolkit.
<<A
HREF=”http://www.dnspython.org/”>http://www.dnspython.org/>eGenix mx packages: mx BASE 2.0.5 (various utilities including
mxDateTime), mx Experimental 0.8.0 (experimental tools), mxODBC
2.0.6 (ODBC connectivity).
<<A
HREF=”http://www.egenix.com/files/python/”>http://www.egenix.com/files/python/>yawPyCrypto 0.1.1, a facade for the PyCrypto library. Flatten
0.2, a serialization library with a secure pickling algorithm,
especially well suited for network transport of data.
<<A
HREF=”http://yawpycrypto.sourceforge.net”>http://yawpycrypto.sourceforge.net>KirbyBase 1.3, a simple, pure-python, flat-file database mgmt
system.
<<A
HREF=”http://www.netpromi.com/kirbybase.html”>http://www.netpromi.com/kirbybase.html>SCons 0.91 beta, a software construction tool (build tool, or
make tool) written in Python.
<<A
HREF=”http://www.scons.org/”>http://www.scons.org/>PyTables 0.7.1, a hierarchical database package to organize and
manipulate scientific data tables as well as Numeric and numarray
data objects that reside on disk.
<<A
HREF=”http://pytables.sourceforge.net/”>http://pytables.sourceforge.net/>Retic 0.1, an EAI Server written in Python. It permits to build
adaptors (data flows) with three types of components : sources,
pipes and sinks.
<<A
HREF=”http://retic.sourceforge.net/”>http://retic.sourceforge.net/>
Everything Python-related you want is probably one or two clicks
away in these pages:
Python.org’s Python Language Website is the traditional center
of Pythonia
http://www.python.org
Notice especially the master FAQ
http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html
PythonWare complements the digest you’re reading with the daily
python url
http://www.pythonware.com/daily
Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new)
World-Wide Web articles related to Python.
http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html
While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL are
utterly different in their technologies and generally in their
results.
comp.lang.python.announce
announces new Python software. Be sure to scan this
newly-revitalized newsgroup at least weekly.
comp.lang.python.announce
Brett Cannon continues the marvelous tradition established by
Andrew Kuchling and Michael Hudson of summarizing action on the
python-dev mailing list once every other week.
http://www.python.org/dev/summary/
The Python Package Index catalogues packages.
http://www.python.org/pypi/
The somewhat older Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects
references to all sorts of Python resources.
http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/
Much of Python’s real work takes place on Special-Interest Group
mailing lists
http://www.python.org/sigs/
The Python Business Forum “further[s] the interests of companies
that base their business on … Python.”
http://www.python-in-business.org
The Python Software Foundation has replaced the Python
Consortium as an independent nexus of activity
http://www.python.org/psf/
Cetus does much of the same
http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html
Python FAQTS
http://python.faqts.com/
The old Python “To-Do List” now lives principally in a
SourceForge reincarnation.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=355470&group_id=5470&func=browse
The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com/.
[email protected] and
[email protected]
welcome submission of material that helps people’s understanding of
Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work.
*Py: the Journal of the Python Language*
http://www.pyzine.com
Archive probing tricks of the trade:
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python&num=100
http://groups.google.com/groups?meta=site%3Dgroups%26group%3Dcomp.lang.python.*
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(dormant) or
comp.lang.python
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